Sprint Says No to Tiered Data Plans… For Now

The current trend with carriers in the US has been to start creating tiers for mobile data. So far I think carriers have been doing a stupid job of it but I think that tiers are where we are heading. Right now most carriers including AT&T and Verizon are offering two plans. A sub 200MB plan for about $15 a month and a 2-5GB plan for $25-30/month. The problem is there is nothing in between. Carriers have refused to make plans that charge based on usage. For example what if they charged $0.01 a megabyte based on usage kind of like electric companies do? That would make more sense. Instead we have these random choices of two tiers.

In defiance of this new trend Sprint’s CEO, Dan Hesse, told All Things D that “So far, we aren’t” with regards to implementing data tiers. According to the CEO:

Customers will pay a premium for simplicity. Even if it’s not in their best economic interest, they will go with the unlimited plan. We were the first to come out with truly unlimited text, voice and data with the Simply Everything plan.

That means that Sprint should be the safe haven for heavy data users for now. Still they have left the door wide open for changing this policy in the future.